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Briefly a Rising Star, Forever a Mourning Son

Sam Khalifa at a field in Tucson, where he was a high school star in football and baseball. After a series of jobs, he drives a cab.Credit
Samantha Sais for The New York Times

TUCSON — It was called the Masjid of Tucson, a mosque where Muslims could worship and study the Koran in the Arizona desert under the idiosyncratic tutelage of Rashad Khalifa, its founder. On Jan. 31, 1990, the mosque, at the intersection of Sixth and North Euclid, near the University of Arizona campus, became the scene of a murder investigation.

Khalifa was found near the kitchen that morning, stabbed to death. It appeared to investigators that whoever had killed him had also tried to set fire to the body in an effort to destroy evidence.

A Ph.D.-educated Egyptian-American, Khalifa had founded his masjid as part of a midlife revelation that he was a messenger of God. In practice and study, Khalifa’s teachings about the Koran were infused with science, modernity and, more than anything, numerology. The number 19, he taught, was “the miracle’s common denominator,” a code that unlocked the Koran, like a secure password.

Much of Islam teaches that the Prophet Muhammad was the last messenger of God, but Khalifa added himself to the list, getting his message out through books, videos and a newsletter called Muslim Perspective.

His scholarship was curious to some and blasphemy to others. He began to receive threats against his life. Once he had been killed, conspiracy theories quickly circulated about who might have been responsible. Tucson investigators eventually came to focus on a local person of interest whose trail they soon lost.

It was not until 2006, when grant money from the Justice Department helped jump-start the city’s backlog of cold-case homicide investigations, that new DNA tests of bloodstains from the crime scene led to the arrest of a man named Glen Francis, who was then living in Canada.

As opening arguments in Francis’s murder trial began on Dec. 11 in Pima County Superior Court here, Sam Khalifa, the son of the victim, sat in the mostly empty gallery. He is 49 now and drives a cab here. But at one time, he was the starting shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Despite his middle-age paunch and the fatigue he wears on his face, Khalifa still resembles the handsome, dark-featured 22-year-old on his 1986 baseball card. In the mid-1980s, Khalifa was the rare Muslim baseball player and, according to Major League Baseball, the very first son of an Egyptian to play in the big leagues. His boyhood narrative included a year spent playing on a makeshift sand field in Tripoli, Libya.

The Arab world back story lent some flavor to his steady development from the minors to the major leagues. The Pirates drafted him in the first round in 1982 out of Tucson’s Sahuaro High School. By 1985, with Pittsburgh going through a series of shortstops, Khalifa replaced the injured Johnnie LeMaster in the starting lineup.

In the end, Khalifa played parts of three seasons in Pittsburgh, but by the 1989 season, he found himself being moved around the infield at the Pirates’ Class AAA affiliate in Buffalo, plagued by the sense that the organization had given up hope that he would ever be its everyday shortstop.

One night during a trip, Khalifa missed a team bus and simply flew home. Five months later, his father was killed, upending his life further and dashing whatever thoughts he had of spring training with another team.

“I know Cal Ripken lost his father one year and he later joined his team, which is respectable, but it wasn’t for me,” Khalifa said during one of several recent conversations. “I think it would have been hard for me to focus on the game.”

It was also hard for Khalifa to focus on his father’s murder, yet he could not help it. Over the next two decades, as the murder investigation went cold, Khalifa got a college degree, drove a cab, tried some sales jobs, tried to get over his anger. Then he went back to driving a cab.

The night before the trial, Khalifa stood beside his taxi. He did not much seem to relish revisiting his playing days, good or bad, or whatever feelings are still attached to them. He tended to describe his abilities by playing them down. Nor did he welcome any newfound attention on those years now that the trial was finally happening.

Photo

Sam Khalifa was born in California. His family lived in several spots in the Middle East, where he played baseball, before settling in Tucson.Credit
Samantha Sais for The New York Times

At one point, he said his big-league career should have lasted 5 or 10 years. It was one of the rare times the dreams of his athletic past broke through.

A Childhood on the Move

One day last month, Khalifa parked his taxi in the courthouse garage and arrived just as jury selection had taken a pause for lunch. In the hall, he spoke briefly with his mother and younger sister, who had been there from the start of proceedings that morning. Khalifa was wearing tan pants, a loosefitting short-sleeve black shirt and a windbreaker.

He can, if prompted, still conjure his baseball promise.

“You were asking me if I was fast,” Khalifa said at lunch that day. “I was quick, and my range was sufficient to make all the plays.”

He admired the agility and enthusiasm with which Ozzie Smith, a Hall of Fame shortstop, played the position.

“I watched him make plays against us that were just like you watch on the highlight reel,” Khalifa said. “I made a couple of those, you know — in the minors, and maybe even a handful in the big leagues.”

And then, to state the obvious, he added, “But Ozzie did it quite frequently.”

Khalifa laughed a little. One year in the minors, he broke his arm twice, just above his wrist, but he said he otherwise had no nagging injuries. His knees are good. After a pastrami sandwich and French fries, he looked at a dessert menu that featured more than 20 flavors of ice cream and chose salted caramel.

Khalifa was born in Fontana, Calif., while his father was working on a Ph.D. in plant sciences at the University of California, Riverside. During his youth, the Khalifas twice relocated to the Middle East as his father took on a series of jobs as a specialist in agricultural or horticultural science.

When he was little, Sam said, the family moved to Alexandria, Egypt, when his father had a position doing research for the Ministry of Agriculture, the first of many stops in a childhood of relocations and intermittent athletic progress.

Sam was 12 when the hopscotching family moved for a year to Tripoli. There, Sam’s father worked as an agricultural consultant to the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Sam recalled a few details about life in Libya in the 1970s. He remembered attending a local mosque with his father, attending the Oil Companies School, and playing baseball on a sand field with the children of Americans employed by oil companies.

“They’d spray it with water, and then roll it with a steamroller,” he said of how the sand was fabricated into an infield. “Like a Zamboni type of thing.”

Khalifa’s American mother grew up in Tucson, and that was where the family ultimately settled when Sam was entering high school. At Sahuaro High School, football was his fall sport; in the spring, he played baseball for a local coaching legend, Hal Eustice.

On the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame Web site, the local organization lists Khalifa’s high school accomplishments: named all-city quarterback by The Arizona Daily Star in 1982, the same year he played shortstop on a state-title-winning baseball team; selected No. 7 over all in the major league draft, the highest ever for an Arizona scholastic player; signed a letter of intent to play baseball at Arizona State but turned professional instead.

The Pirates gave him a $100,000 signing bonus, Khalifa said.

Death Threats

Rashad Khalifa, 54 when he was killed, had first come to the United States and earned a master of science degree in horticulture at the University of Arizona in 1962, and later a Ph.D. in plant sciences at U.C. Riverside. Three decades on, with his son working his way to the big leagues, Rashad Khalifa, according to Sam, was working for the State of Arizona in Mesa.

A car accident during his commute one day contributed to his father’s decision to devote himself full time to his masjid, to Islamic teaching and study. Years before, while Rashad Khalifa was working for Monsanto in St. Louis, his faith had brought into his life a prominent pro football player named Bobby Moore, then one of the few African-Americans on the N.F.L.’s St. Louis Cardinals. The player changed his name to Ahmad Rashad.

Photo

Sam Khalifa played parts of three seasons in Pittsburgh.Credit
Rick Stewart/Getty Images

Sam said his father was always a big supporter of his baseball career, especially when he hit the big time with the Pirates.

“It’s been a great thing, thank God, to watch him grow and see this,” Rashad Khalifa said in a 1986 article published in a magazine called Saudi Aramco World, named for the Arabian American Oil Company.

The Aramco World article noted that Pirates broadcasters had called Sam the Cairo Kid, even if neither he nor his father actually hailed from there.

Rashad Khalifa, growing ever more serious about his faith and his scholarship, even cut Sam slack about his fealty to Islam. Not that he ever lost his own ordering of what mattered most.

“He wanted it to be the most important thing for me, more important than baseball,” Khalifa said of his faith. “He was all about making sure that in your mind and in your soul you knew what your priorities were, and that was to make sure that God was the most important thing in your life.”

When Khalifa began publishing books, one of his first, published under the name Islamic Productions, was called “The Computer Speaks: God’s Message to the World.”

The computer, Khalifa believed, was a latter-day “creature made of earthly materials” through which the Koran was broken down mathematically, and God’s true message, the miracle of 19, was revealed.

In the appendix of his translation “Quran: The Final Testament,” Khalifa described how in the 1970s, he wrote the Koran into the computer and discovered what he saw as the purified word of God revealed through a mathematical system, correcting the distortions of prior English translations.

“I used a time-share terminal, connected by telephone to a giant computer,” he wrote. He had removed two verses from the Koran for not conforming to the pattern.

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In a 1988 video sermon, Rashad Khalifa seems not so much a firebrand as a balding professor lecturing with authority and occasional humor on his new job as messenger of God, a calling that he said he had “chickened out” of announcing previously. Even though his father is often referred to in articles as an imam or cleric, Sam Khalifa is not comfortable with those terms and all that they can imply these days.

“Rashad didn’t interpret the Koran” but just stated facts that were uncomfortable to much of the Muslim world, he said, including that worship of the Prophet Muhammad alongside God is a form of idolatry.

The threats against Rashad Khalifa’s life came soon enough. His sister later said that his worry grew so great that he feared he was under surveillance while he was bent in prayer.

In 1989, the Tucson police told Rashad Khalifa that an F.B.I. raid of a storage unit in Colorado had revealed evidence of a possible plot against him by an American-based Islamic sect called Al Fuqra. The group was said to be founded by Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, the cleric whom, years later, The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl was seeking to interview in Pakistan when Pearl was kidnapped and killed.

Sam Khalifa, struggling to keep his major league dreams alive, knew of the controversy and fear back home.

“My father, he was responsible for his own actions, and I am, too,” Sam Khalifa said. “I was playing baseball, he was doing what he was doing. Naturally, I was concerned for him, but I wasn’t going to be able to stop what he wanted to do.”

The article noted that Khalifa got six hits in his first 11 at-bats in the big leagues, even though he was considered more of a fielder than a hitter.

“He’s got quickness, and in the game of baseball, he’s very intelligent,” Chuck Tanner, then the manager of the Pirates, said of Khalifa at the time. “He’s come by leaps and bounds because of his desire and his ability to learn. He’s going to be a good, solid major league shortstop.”

Khalifa’s rookie year was his best with the Pirates. He hit .238, including 14 doubles, over 95 games. But he also encountered something relatively unfamiliar to him: slumps. And the Pirates were having a miserable season, mired in the cellar of the National League East.

The organization was well beyond the feel-good “We Are Family” 1979 World Series team of Willie Stargell and Omar Moreno and not yet the divisional dynasty with the dream outfield of Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla and Andy Van Slyke. Pittsburgh lost 104 games in Khalifa’s rookie year. The team was up for sale, and current and former players were being called to testify before a grand jury looking into a cocaine ring in the clubhouse.

Khalifa “played adequately but the team was struggling big-time, so it was hard for any rookie to show everything he could do,” said Steve Demeter, a first-base coach for the Pirates in 1985.

After the season, Tanner was fired, and Jim Leyland was given his first big-league managerial job. Leyland, now the manager of the American League champion Detroit Tigers, recalled that he had Khalifa platooning at shortstop in 1986 with Rafael Belliard.

“Sammy was the more overall talented guy; they thought he was going to hit,” Leyland said in a recent interview. Like others who readily recall Khalifa, Leyland called him “a good kid” before suggesting his problems were more mental than physical.

“I wasn’t really sure that he was into it as much as you need to be to maybe max out your ability,” Leyland said.

Bonds joined the team (Khalifa recalls he was skinnier back then). So, too, did Bonilla, who had been Khalifa’s roommate when the two played in Class A ball. But Khalifa was on his way out of baseball.

That season with the Pirates, Khalifa hit another slump, and his batting average withered to .185. He was sent back to the minors — to Honolulu, to Vancouver, to Harrisburg and to his last stop, Buffalo. The Bisons had a promising shortstop, Jay Bell, who eventually nailed down the job in Pittsburgh.

Bell, the current hitting instructor for the Pirates, recalled that Khalifa was hard on himself.

“That was one of the things that I remember about Sammy, was the fact that there was no separation of the game at the park or away from the park,” Bell said. “It was more about constantly grinding over what had happened during the game, good or bad, instead of just walking away from it and separating.”

The last straw for Khalifa came one night during a road trip. He remembered that he called the team trainer to say he would be on the team bus in five minutes. The Bisons, then managed by Terry Collins, now the manager of the Mets, left him behind anyway, he said.

Khalifa flew home to Tucson instead of catching up with the team, and the Pirates suspended him. In an item in The Sporting News at the time, Khalifa told a reporter: “I had a lot of different feelings. I was frustrated, so I decided to come home.” Chuck LaMar, the minor league director for the Pirates, summed up Khalifa as “basically confused.”

“He’s so confused about what he wants to do that I think he’ll be out all year,” LaMar said at the time.

Photo

Glen Francis, right, during his trial in the murder of Rashad Khalifa. Francis was represented by Sean Bruner, left, a public defender.Credit
Benjie Sanders/Arizona Daily Star

Back home, his father encouraged him not to give up, Khalifa said, and it seemed he would not. Joe L. Brown, the former general manager of the Pirates who guided the team to World Series championships in the 1960s and 1970s, tried to arrange a spring training tryout with the San Diego Padres, Khalifa said.

But then his father was murdered in the middle of a January night — a time when Rashad Khalifa liked to work in peace and quiet — and Sam never made it to a Padres tryout.

Some 23 years after Rashad Khalifa’s death, the Pima County Attorney’s Office had a murder case to prosecute. Three years after the case was reopened, the authorities arrested Glen Francis in Calgary, Alberta. Francis fought extradition for two years, but ultimately went on trial here last month.

Not much is known about Francis. Sean Bruner, of the Pima County Public Defender’s Office, cast his client as somebody who moved around to pick up the odd job, a native of Trinidad and Tobago who came to Tucson in 1990 to work illegally. Bruner suggested Francis was an unlikely suspect for a murder that might have been driven by religious zealotry.

Francis appeared to have lived in the area under an alias, according to the judge’s pretrial factual findings in the case. And he was at least once picked up by federal authorities, who took care to take a DNA sample. Ultimately, with the local cold case squad revived, that DNA sample was matched to blood evidence taken from the murder scene in 1990.

The question of whether people had been out to kill Khalifa for religious reasons had taken interesting turns over the intervening years. Two men arrested as a result of the F.B.I.’s 1989 raid of the reputed Al Fuqra storage unit in Colorado were ultimately convicted of conspiring to kill Khalifa. It was even believed by law enforcement that one of the people involved in tracking Khalifa was Wadih el-Hage, who is serving life in prison for his role in the 1998 bombings of United States embassies in Africa.

But prosecutors, all these years later, have made little effort trying to determine or prove Francis’s possible motive, beyond some long-ago statements Francis might have made about Khalifa’s teachings and murder. Whether he was acting on the orders of others has not been raised. The case they put on last month was almost strictly driven by the DNA evidence.

“They had all these big names and big-time people wanting to kill this guy, and there’s no motive for this guy, there’s no history for this guy, there’s no nothing,” Bruner said of Francis.

During opening arguments, Sam Khalifa sat with his sister while their mother watched from a chair at the back of the room. He and his family had waited a long time for justice.

In the end, the trial moved quickly, and the verdict was returned briskly. Glen Francis was found guilty of Rashad Khalifa’s murder.

Sam Khalifa bought his parents’ old house years ago and now rents it out. He has recently done some football and baseball coaching at his alma mater, Sahuaro High School. It’s about all the exercise he gets, he said with an implied shrug.

In public, he has a habit of looking behind him. Sometimes, it’s just a glance; other times, he turns his body. Asked about it, Khalifa smiled shyly and speculated that it had something to do with years spent in a cab. He leases the cab and can make his own hours, and he generally drives between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m., he said. He’s fluent in Tucson’s many Mexican restaurants.

He admitted to watching this year’s World Series between the Tigers and the Giants.

“Exciting,” he said.

But his major league life seemed pretty well buried.

After court one day during the trial, Khalifa fished from the trunk of his cab one of his father’s writings, “Quran, The Final Testament.” It was getting to be evening. Khalifa was going back to work.

The masjid, now a piece of rental property at a busy intersection, still has the words “Happiness Is Submission to God” painted on the side, visible as you drive past on North Euclid Avenue. The property is now in a family trust. In the course of his work, Sam Khalifa — once a Muslim baseball curiosity, ever so briefly a shining prospect, long the mourning son of a murdered father — drives by it all the time.

A version of this article appears in print on January 2, 2013, on Page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: Briefly a Rising Star, Forever a Mourning Son. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe